In The Company #6: Bernadette Jiwa and the power of hunches

In this podcast episode of In The Company we chat with Bernadette Jiwa, a recognised global authority on the role of story in business, innovation and marketing. Bernadette is a business advisor, keynote speaker and best-selling A=author of five #1 Amazon bestsellers, including Marketing: A Love Story and Meaningful: The story of ideas that fly. Bernadette works with Fortune 500 companies, startups, entrepreneurs and business leaders from around the world, helping them to build their brands and become meaningful to their customers.

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Kylie: You’re listening to In The Company, a podcast about humanising work and designing better working lives. Each episode is curated to provoke you to think more deeply about things that matter in your career and life, and how to build your toolkit for how to thrive as a human in business today. We explore how we work from the inside out. I’m Kylie Lewis, and it’s great to be in your company. Welcome.

Today we’re in the company of Bernadette Jiwa, a recognised global authority on the role of story in business innovation and marketing. She’s a business advisor, keynote speaker, and best-selling author of five number one Amazon best sellers, including Marketing: A Love Story, and Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly. Bernadette works with Fortune 500 companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and business leaders from around the world helping them build their brands and become meaningful to their customers. In Jun 2017, Bernadette published her sixth book, Hunch: How To Turn Your Everyday Insights Into the Next Big Thing. Welcome Bernadette.

Kylie: I’m just ecstatic to have you here. I’ve been a long time fan from a distance so it’s lovely to actually get up close to talk about your work today, because as a fellow marketer I’ve admired your work from afar for several years, and mainly because you put the words meaning, love, and story in the same sentence as marketing. As a professional marketer myself that’s kind of rare, and you focus on helping brands tell their story in a meaningful way with really powerful results. Before we jump into that, I’d really like to just know a little bit more about the young Bernadette actually and what did she love doing as a child?

Bernadette: Oh, the sorts of things I loved doing were drawing and colouring and sitting, the seated creative activities. Sitting at the dining room table and listening to adults. My parents are both from very big families. I was brought up in Dubin. There were 11 siblings in each of those families so there were a lot of adults around us. We lived in a little two up, two down house with my granny and my uncle so we were kind of tightly packed in there. I was always surrounded by adults and I loved listening to their conversations. Coming from Ireland of course, people have that habit of chatting a lot there.

Kylie: Yes. You were surrounded by story from the day [inaudible 00:02:51].

Bernadette: Absolutely. I always say that in Ireland, the kettle is just an excuse to sit down and have a conversation. It’s not that people want to drink tea at all.

Kylie: Well, I’m all for that. We should actually be sipping tea while we have this interview. What three things does adult Bernadette believe in now?

Bernadette: Well, I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, and thinking about your first question, which was what did you like to do as a kid, and thinking about how our backstories shape our future stories. I think that we can’t and shouldn’t try to escape our back story. I saw that in a really positive way, because even the negative things that inevitably come up in our backstories are actually what make us unique and we should use that. That’s one of the things I believe. One of the other things I believe is that small kindnesses are underrated and that each of us as an individual is more powerful than we think.

Kylie: Absolutely. I love that not escaping our back stories and we’ll talk about that in just a second because that’s really pivotal with the work that you do in encouraging people to actually own their story and put that out into the word. As marketers, we are the creators of meaning, and our stories are the places that inform that meaning going forward. Maybe we’ll jump into that actually. In your professional work as a marketer and a consultant, ho do you define what a brand story is and why it’s important?

Bernadette: A story, our story, our business or product or service story is the way we make our product and services meaningful to the people who will adopt them and use them. A company for example without a purpose or a vision can’t succeed in becoming meaningful to a customer. Our story is a really powerful way to create value. It’s also communicating what we’re here to contribute and how we add value to the lives of others.

Kylie: Yeah. I often hear people say that I do this job or I’m in this business because my purpose is that I need to make money, but that’s not what resonates with customers. No one wants to feel like they’re just constantly being sold to for the sake of it. We actually buy from businesses that create meaning in our own life.

Bernadette: I think if we think about personally any brand that we are loyal to, whether that’s your local café down the street, or my lovely little organic shop down the street here in Melbourne, there’s definitely a sense that they are contributing something, that they’re not just opening they’re doors to take every cent. There’s definitely something else. That doesn’t have to be altruism or giving to charity. It can be something as being a welcoming café. Giving back to the community in some way whether it’s a water ball for dogs, it’s an indication that you’re here to do something else. I feel like deep down most businesses are in that business. I know very few businesses and very few entrepreneurs or CEOs who are just there to make money. I believe everybody wants to make meaning.

Kylie: One of the exercises I do actually with all of my clients is I ask them to write down a list of between 20 to 50 things that they believe in, which is why I also start the podcast asking my guests about what they believe in too because we don’t often interrogate our own meaning-making process because I think we get caught up in living it and often we don’t value it enough and so I was wondering in your work what do you think holds people back from telling their brand story and how do they get past it?

Bernadette: Ironically I think sometimes it’s this need for success and this notion of falling love with our own ideas so we start to think we’re so wedded to succeeding and we’re so wedded to our good idea that we fail to step outside ourselves and be more aware and more empathetic towards the people we hope we’ll be able to serve and towards the people who we’re relying on to come and support us. I feel like that’s the biggest lock to us doing a good job of telling our story. We come up with these ideas in isolation and think it’s a super good idea and instead of thinking about solving an unmet need for a particular customer.

Kylie: Do you also think that there is potentially sort of that shield that goes up of when we put an idea out there and it meeting with reality, and that absolute moment of uncertainty and unpredictability about whether or not it will be successful. We kind of shut down that vulnerability piece, that authentic storytelling piece and put up more of a veneer of what we think people want to see.

Bernadette: For sure. A lot of the time when I am consulting with clients, one of the things I reflect back to them is that this website is not a window, it feels like a wall. It doesn’t show me anything of what’s inside. It feels like if I took away your logo from the top of this website and replaced it with a competitors, the story would still apply and I think that’s a good test. If you feel like you could replace your logo with somebody else’s logo on your website then that’s not your true authentic story you’re living and breathing there.

Kylie: I love that, that the website is a window, not a wall. That’s a really great analogy. The other thing that I know that you offer as a service and that you talk about on your website is the importance of an about/ask page on a business’s website. We are kindred spirits when it comes to doing that and consulting with our businesses because it’s one of the first pages that I’ll go to whenever I land on a website because I want to know the story of who’s behind the website. Why is it that you think it is so important that we have a great about page?

Bernadette: For exactly the reason you said there. We underestimate how often people come to our website and visit the about page. It’s one of the most visited pages on our website. If your listeners would like to have a look at our analytics, they’ll find out that I’m not just making that up. On most websites it might be the first or second most visited page. In fact, one of the most visited pages on my website, apart from my About Page is How To Write An About Page. That’s one of my most visited posts. It’s the best chance we have to build trust in a digital age.

Kylie: I’m really interested in asking you this question about what do you think are the crucial ingredients to a great about page because I have a list and I’d love to know what’s on your checklist of a great About page.

Bernadette: I think the biggest one is that it’s not all about you. It’s actually about showing visitors and prospective customers that you see then. People soon get very bored just hearing about what it is you’ve done and how great you are. You’ve got to have a balance between building trust and showing people how you can help them. The other thing we sometimes forget to do is invite people to take action. Contact Me or Email Us or Call Us. We forget to do that and we’re losing out on a great opportunity there to invite our customers to take the next step.

Kylie: And speaking like a human, copy that reads like somebody with a personality wrote it and it didn’t come out of an auto-generated commercial-ese type piece of software.

Bernadette: Yeah. You make a good point there Kylie. I think once we start writing for business we tend to feel like we’ve got to get all professional. [inaudible 00:12:47] you know, my advice to people is if you wouldn’t say it, don’t write it. If you find yourself inserting a word that you would never say in conversation, then don’t put that in there.

Kylie: 100%. I couldn’t agree with you more. The other thing that I also see lacking on a lot of About pages, especially in small businesses is a photo of the people or the person who started the business or who are behind the business. I actually want to connect with a face and I swear people would rather stick pins in their eyes than put photos of themselves on their about pages in my experience. And yet, to your point, in terms of building trust, it’s another tool that we can use to build that bridge.

Bernadette: Yeah. It goes back again to thinking about why is this page here and who is it for? Who’s coming here? Thinking about one person at a time who’s coming to visit your page and what they want to see. What would you want to see there? How would you feel and how do you want to make people feel when they land on the page? I feel like that’s also something we forget. We think, My website needs an About page because every website needs an About page, and we forget what the page is there to do.

Kylie: What would you say are the essentials to crafting your own brand story?

Bernadette: Authenticity and going back to your backstory. I’m working on a new framework actually because I’ve actually gone through several iterations with clients of helping them to do this, as you probably have over the years, and I’ve come up with a framework that I feel like is simplifying it now for people, even more, drilling down. I’m calling this a story-driven framework. It starts with your backstory and to your point about your beliefs, you have to bring your values in there. Then what a lot of people might call remission I’m calling your contribution, your aspirations, which are your vision for what you what to do in the world. Then your strategy goes on top of that so that’s your product and services and your business model and how you’re going to manifest a story in the world.

Kylie: Terrific. Again, coming back to owning your story and really interrogating why this business, why now, why me, why is this important? Then layering everything out of that. It’s powerful.

Bernadette: Because people, we tend to actually underestimate the power of story and only use it as a way to describe value almost. This pencil is made from, the barrel is made of mahogany wood and the ink was made here or we harvested our beans in such and such a place. It’s not just about the origin story of the products and services or how they’re made. It’s actually something that goes deeper than that.

Kylie: Yeah. We’re meaning-making machines aren’t we? There’s the whole neuroscience that’s now coming into how our brains are literally wired for story to make meaning and sense of the world around us. When they’re attached to an emotion, when they have emotional resonance with us it embeds itself in us in ways that facts and figures just can’t.

Bernadette: The other piece of that Kylie is that people tend to think, Oh well perhaps I’m being a bit manipulative trying to find some kind of spin on my product or service. My sense is if you go back to your backstory and understand the reason why you started the business. In every great business there is just a brilliant backstory from even a massive brand like Audi has got a simple backstory of one man wanting to help athletes perform really well. Nike, the same. One of the brands that I had the pleasure of working with, they used to be called Vincard LSAFE and then [inaudible 00:17:40] Hospitality. What they do is recordable key cards, those cards that let you into hotel rooms. Their backstory is incredible. A Norwegian lock maker who saw that his favourite singer Carlie Francis had been attacked in her hotel bedroom in the US and just thought this couldn’t go on. There had to be a better way, and went and invented this product. Incredible.

Kylie: Yeah. The answer to that question about why this business, why do this work? In my experience when I’ve asked that question, why, why, and drilled down. There’s a technique. The five why’s technique that actually can help people get to that. Inevitably it always comes back to some contribution to humanity in some way I’ve found.

Bernadette: Exactly. Let’s face it. Business can be tough as well as it can be rewarding. If you’re going to do it you need to be very deliberate and intentional. It’s never, actually a friend of mine said, “Oh, I see you’ve launched a new book. I’d love to write a book. Would I make a lot of money writing a book?” I said, “Please don’t write a book if that’s your primary goal.” He said, “But some people sell millions of copies and make millions of dollars.” I said, “Yes, and they do that, they’re one in a million first off, and the ones that do that never did it for the money.” There’s always a meaning component there. I believe that anyone who starts a business has that need to create meaning and to take control of what it is they put out there into the world.

Kylie: Yeah. That’s the emotional component to it, isn’t it? When you do put the words love and meaning in marketing, it’s not by accident.

Bernadette: It was a risky strategy I still think, writing a book called Marketing: A Love Story. I couldn’t help myself.

Kylie: I’m sold. I’m with you on the same page. I also noticed apart from the About Page service that you offer, you also offer services on branding and brand names, and you’ve done some extensive work in that area. I can’t tell you the pain that I went through to name this podcast. What are some strategies you have to come up with a great brand name?

Bernadette: Voodoo is one. Getting under the skin of the entrepreneur who is founding the company or the business who wants to release its product so I can communicate their intention as succinctly as possible. You know, it’s part art, part science. Sometimes it just feels like luck and it isn’t because you need to do a lot of groundwork to get to that perfect name, and when you do it’s one of the most rewarding and fulfilling things you can do to help people communicate the essence of what it is they want to bring to the world.

Kylie: Yeah. Then you overlay the complexity now of operating in a global business environment where you’re not going to worry just if potentially it’s a locally registered name but you know is the Instagram handle available for that?

Bernadette: Exactly. Domain names, Instagram, and all increasingly all of the different social channels and who’ toes you might be stepping on. It’s a complex process too.

Kylie: Yes. But well worth spending time to get it right.

Bernadette: Well, because you’re going to live with it forever. You might change your logo. It’s interesting how much we invest sometimes in design and how flip we can be with the naming when we’re going to live with that for a long time.

Kylie: Yeah. Repeatedly say it over and over and over again. Tens of thousands of times. I now want to talk about your latest book, which is just being recently released. Again, getting into what I call the soft tissue of business, which is delving into the emotional feeling side of how we actually make decisions, not just based on hard data, but tapping into our intuition and our hunches about things. How did this book come to be?

Bernadette: The book is called Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights Into The Next Big Thing. I wrote it because I noticed, exactly as you’re saying that people, entrepreneurs, smart people, leaders in companies, were leaning on data and they were not trusting themselves as much. They were trusting themselves less and trusting the data more. I’m not saying you have to ignore every piece of data that you’ve got, but there are other kinds of data that are right under your nose in the stories in front of you.

Entrepreneurship and innovation are built on trusting yourself and making uncertain leaps into the unknown. That’s why I wrote his book, to remind people that they had access to a lot of skills that they were actually dumbing down by just leaning on graphs and charts and things that were proven.

Kylie: What do you think holds us back from cultivating our hunches or trusting our hunches?

Bernadette: Fear of being wrong and the fact that now we’ve got, it’s easy now to say, well the data said it wasn’t me. The data pointed that we should go in this direction. It wasn’t our fault. This fear of being wrong is interesting because when you think about it, when you were three you didn’t care about that. You were quite happy to ask questions and show your ignorance. As you get older, knowledge becomes currency and you get marks for getting all the right answers on the test and we all know that whoever gets the most right answers gets the best job, has the nicest life, and essentially wins. That’s what we believe and that fear of being wrong has stopped us, I think it’s stifling our creativity essentially.

Kylie: Do you think it also shows up differently between men and women in your experience? The reason that I ask this question is because I remember reading a research study based on men and women taking tests and it was kind of set up so that they couldn’t possibly know all the answers on the test. Men would seem to have a tendency of having a go at just choosing an answer, even if they didn’t know it, whereas women really held back and didn’t even want to have the possibility of choosing that wrong answer so they didn’t even have a go.

Bernadette: It’s interesting that you ask that. I was interviewed this morning by a guy who’s got a fabulous podcast in the US called John [inaudible 00:25:55]. You’ll know him from Duct Tape Marketing. He interviewed me at 5 AM as I told you earlier. What he was asking was, he said, oh do you think some people are better at this? He said, well actually what I’m saying is, are women better at the intuitive side of things? I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as that. You cannot say that one sex is better. I think a lot of it depends on what we cultivate in ourselves as individuals. We all have the opportunity to do it. We have all have the opportunity to notice things and develop the three characteristics that I have found these intuitive entrepreneurs who take leaps are able to cultivate, which are creativity, empathy, and imagination. The people who are most intuitive and use that intuition successfully, marry these three traits.

Kylie: That’s a great segway to actually talking about how do we actually cultivate our hunches?

Bernadette: Well, we do it by noticing things, by questioning things, by understanding what’s going on around us, by asking questions like what’s happening that shouldn’t be, and what’s not happening that should be. If you think about any of the products and services that we think, oh that was a genius idea, actually most of them were based on hunches. They didn’t have any proof that the idea would work. They had to just trust their gut and go with it.

Kylie: That’s true. There’s no guarantees in business at all. We don’t know what will work and won’t work until we actually get in the arena and give it a crack.

Bernadette: Absolutely. One of the tools that you would say is to ask lots of questions.

Kylie: The other thing, one of the other big pieces in the book was about digital distraction and not just digital. The amount of content we could consume. The amount of time we spend consuming and not creating, looking down at our phones and not looking up at what’s going on around us. I feel like that’s also stifling our ability to innovate and be creative.

Bernadette: Absolutely. It’s so easy to be a consumer rather than a creator. Yet, it’s through the creation that we learn and discover and not just in … I can hear the kind of recovering perfectionist in me within an insatiable desire to gather more and more information or more and more data and more and more points of view that becomes to the point of paralysis of actually not doing anything.

Kylie: The other thing is we want to optimise so we always have our earbuds in on our commute. We’re always listening to something. We’re multi-tasking. We’re doing ten things at once, and we’re not giving ourselves thinking time. I was listening to an interview with Sarah Blakely who is the founder of this Spanx Shapewear brand. She took her hunch with a $5,000 investment to a billion-dollar brand and she is the sole owner of, and she talked about how she’s got four kids now. She drops them off to school or nursery or daycare or wherever they go, and her office is very close to home. What she does is she takes a 45-minute commute to the office. She sits in her car once she drops her kids off and goes the long way around and just thinks. That’s her thinking time. She actually prioritises that as you would a workout into your day. It’s interesting that we would make time to exercise or eat and do everything else that we need to nourish ourselves and we don’t make time to think.

Bernadette: It’s like mental hygiene. It reminds me of Dr Adam Frasier who talks about the third space. Have you heard of his work?

Kylie: Yeah. I have.

Bernadette: Yeah, so cultivating the space between one point in our day and another point in our day to allow that transition time from leaving that behind to being present right now, before we then go and butt up against something new that’s going to require our attention. It’s that mindfulness really isn’t it?

Kylie: How often do we do it? You look around you at the airport and airport [inaudible 00:30:54] is the world over. You’ll see that none of us are doing that, or on the tram in the morning, none of us are doing it.

Bernadette: To cultivate our hunches we need to give ourselves time to ask questions and give ourselves permission to ask questions, to I guess almost admit that we don’t have it all worked out and that there are lots of opportunities out there. We’re looking for unmet needs rather than … So to do that we have to practise and look for patterns and recognise problems around us and think about what we might be able to do to solve those problems.

Kylie: How do we cultivate the courage to act on our hunches?

Bernadette: We have to just get over this idea that we need to know for sure and we have to trust our gut and go. If you think about where was the data for Google or Facebook or Sarah Blakely’s Spanx or Amazon or Starbucks or the GoPro camera or the iPhone. None of them were surefire things.

Kylie: It’s 100% correct, and yet in my work, particularly in this data environment, a lot of the thing that are holding people back is like, “I’ll do that when. I’ll do that when I have it all worked out or it’s perfected or I have more data or I’m 100% certain it’s going to work,” and yet that’s not what gives longevity. That’s not what grows a business.

Bernadette: Well if you think about some, the thing is you don’t know when you’re going to have it all worked out. You don’t even know when you start what worked out looks like. If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg talk about Facebook, he’ll say, “We didn’t even know what it was going to be. We thought somebody else was going to build this social network that was going to take over the world. We didn’t think it was us.” They had no idea when they started what having it all worked out looked like. The beauty of trusting your gut and launching and trying and testing, is that you get to try and fail and then iterate, and let your users, let your customers, show you what they want.

Kylie: In writing the book, did you come across many examples in small business in particular?

Bernadette: I got lots of examples in small business. I’ve got a beautiful example of the lady, actually the couple in New South Wales, they live in rural New South Wales and they’ve got this ironing board cover, which is called It Fits Like A Glove ironing board cover. They came up with this idea when people were not ironing. They were stopping ironing. Hotel rooms are increasingly putting steamers in. We don’t have ironing boards in our homes anymore, and yet they have managed to carve out a really great niche for people who still love ironing who are perfectionists, who want this ironing board cover that’s going to be a dream to iron on. They’ve got a good going business with that. When you think about brands like, one of the brands I talk about in the book is Goldiblox, which is the girl’s construction toy. That was invented by a young female graduate from Stanford. Admittedly she was an engineer who saw an opportunity to help girls to develop spatial awareness. There were no construction toys that they enjoyed playing with so she married their language skills with the construction skills by giving them a story to play along with.

These are all small business stories. Even behemoth brands like the GoPro, that started with a strap to strap your camera to you when you were surfing. I like to say that every million and billion dollar startup started out as a small business. We tend to see them as being exceptions.

Kylie: Yes. They all started somewhere with a hunch that somebody had about asking a question of, what if, or what might this look like, or what could this look like?

Bernadette: One of the things that I emphasise also in the book is that the next big thing doesn’t have to be a billion-dollar brand. You don’t have to be going to be a unicorn startup in Silicone Valley. You can be the next big thing in your neighbourhood, a neighbourhood café or a seamstress or a designer or like my organic store up the road or a tiny bakery. You don’t have to want to conquer the whole wide world. You can make a difference to a tiny corner of it.

Kylie: You also don’t have to be a genius.

Bernadette: Well genius is a loaded word isn’t it? That’s one of the things that I wanted to blow up in the book, this idea of the genius trap that if you close your eyes and I said to you, Well imagine a genius. I can guarantee a couple of the things that would come out of your mouth straight away. You would say to me, “I see a picture Einstein, or Steve Jobs, or academic scrolls, or PHDs, [inaudible 00:37:12], Stanford, and Harvard.” Actually, genius is much more ordinary than that. That’s a very narrow world view or what genius is. There’s genius in the waiter who is managing to take care of a section in his restaurant or nurse who manages to comfort somebody who is dying, or a teacher who holds the attention of a classroom of 30 kids. That’s genius to me.

Kylie: Yeah. We actually all have a spark of our very own brand of genius within us.

Bernadette: Absolutely, but we don’t want to own that. It’s a tough label to own.

Kylie: Yes. As you said, it’s very loaded. I just wanted to then kind of bring it back. One of the things that you just mentioned before was about getting over the need to know in order to progress further. We’re really having to break a lot of our earlier conditioning in life where we are rewarded for having the one right answer.
Bernadette: We are.

Kylie: That can be a very confronting experience in showing up and confronting that about ourselves. What role do you think having a support team around you or having someone that you can go to and tell your crazy ideas or just talk through something with has in actually helping people get over that need and embrace the uncertainty?

Bernadette: Sometimes advice and opinions can be a double-edged sword. I saw Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder do something which I thought was peculiar, and maybe it’s not peculiar because maybe he’s got a mentor in his life, but he put out a Tweet the other day that said, “I normally have a long-term view of things and I’m thinking about doing some philanthropy that creates an immediate impact. What do you think?”, and asked people for ideas. Of course, he got thousands of, I think you should give money to my x project or whatever. Nothing that was strategic or aligned with his values or his beliefs. I thought that was super unusual for him. That’s what I would say is that you need to choose carefully, your mentors carefully because it’s very easy to squash an idea. People who care about you and don’t want to see you fail because you know what that’s going to mean to you actually might give you advice that they feel is protecting you and it could be the wrong advice. Who knows?

Kylie: Yes. Yes. Often it’s the people that love us the most that want to protect us the most, and in doing so keep us small rather than being there with the net to catch us if it doesn’t go to plan.

Bernadette: Not intentionally, so you should see me play a small game, but not wanting to see the world beat you up.

Kylie: Yes.Bernadette: We know that with anybody who’s got kids, you hate to see your child falling down. It’s just the more horrible thing. You do everything you can to avoid that.

Kylie: And yet you know at the same time that resilience is only developed by being able to overcome the moments when we do fall down and we have to get ourselves back up.

Bernadette: Probably the best thing you can do for your child is to just let them go and not give them knee pads and elbow pads when they’re learning to ride their bike. They soon learn.

Kylie: They soon learn how to keep it up straight. I think I’ve found in my coaching work, like you said, be very careful about who you choose to surround yourself with to have these conversations with. In my coaching work, I found that when you can find someone who will hold a space for you, nonjudgmentally and enable you to talk through what your hunch might be and what you’re thinking might be a way forward and ask you some kind of well-timed provocative questions that can … very often the instigator of that person then being able to back themselves to take some action on their hunch.

Bernadette: It sounds like you’re doing a great job.

Kylie: Oh, well that’s what the role of coaching is. I think that your book is actually what compliments that whole idea.

Bernadette: Well, I’m glad you found some of the ideas resonate with what you’re doing.

Kylie: Absolutely. To wrap up I’ve got a few last questions that I would like to ask you. I would really love to know what three things would you like people to take away from our chat today?

Bernadette: You’re more powerful than you think. You have everything you need, and giving a damn is underrated.

Kylie: So well said. Where can people find out more about your Bernadette?

Bernadette: My website is thestoryoftelling.com.

Kylie: You have books and courses and downloadable resources, a brilliant daily blog?

Bernadette: It’s three times. It feels daily. I love it when people say, “oh you write to me every day.” I think, oh I wish I had the discipline of my friends Seth Godin who does write every day. Then I think, well it’s okay. You [inaudible 00:43:12] every day. That’s great. Three times a week I write there.

Kylie: Which is a very empathetic way of communicating with your readers as well because they’re always short, snackable emails that are easy to digest. I love that. I have a quick thing to finish up. It’s called our ten by ten. We have ten questions and you have ten seconds to answer each of these questions. Are you up for it?

Bernadette: I’m up for it.

Kylie: Alright. Let’s get going. Number one. What I like about myself is…

Bernadette: That I care.

Kylie: I beat procrastination by…

Bernadette: Creating triggers and routines that serve me like having my gym gear at the top of the stairs.

Kylie: A song on my life soundtrack is…

Bernadette: Beautiful Day by U2.

Kylie: The world needs more…

Bernadette: That’s easy. Empathy.

Kylie: Stand in the shoes of the people you aim to serve. A phrase I live by is…

Bernadette: This is a beautiful one from my friend Seth Godin, which is at the start of this book, which is, “You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.”

Kylie: That’s a home run right there. Something everyone must do is…

Bernadette: Notice.

Kylie: A book that changed me is…

Bernadette: Lots of books have changed me. I think the ones that have stayed with me are the Laura Ingles Wilder books from my childhood about pioneers living in cabins and just making the most of everything that they’ve got.

Kylie: Fear and I…

Bernadette: Are friends.

Kylie: Something that always makes me feel good is…

Bernadette: Doing a body pump class.

Kylie: Number ten. My legacy will be…

Bernadette: That’s easy. My three boys and my writing.

Kylie: Thanks so much for your time Bernadette and thank you for writing some incredible books that, from a fellow marketer, have absolutely changed the way that I approach my profession. Thank you.

Bernadette: Thanks for inviting me to chat to you Kylie. It’s been a pleasure.